Apple silences Psystar's rebel yell with injunction

No more, more, more litigation?

Apple has finally secured a permanent injunction against Hackintosh thorn-in-the-side Psystar, apparently bringing over a year and a half of litigation to an end.

The injunction, granted by the US District Court for the Northern District of California, prohibits Psystar Corp from selling copies of the Mac OS or selling products that can circumvent Apple's access control. Psystar had sought to build a business selling non-Apple computers running the Mac OS.

The granting of the injunction comes a fortnight after Psystar was forced to cave in to Apple with a $2.7m partial settlement of the Mac vendor's copyright infringement suit, split between damages and legal costs.

At that time, Psystar asked that the settlement should not cover its Rebel EFI software - which enables the installation of the Mac OS X on non-Apple machines.

However, yesterday's injunction amongst other things, orders that Psystar is enjoined from:

"Defendant must immediately destroy any technology, product, device, component, or part thereof in its custody or control that has been used to circumvent any technological protection measure that effectively controls access to plaintiff’s copyrighted Mac OS X software, or effectively protects the rights held by plaintiff under the Copyright Act with respect to its copyrighted Mac OS X software."

Psystar has until December 31 to comply. The injunction leaves Psystar little wriggle room in offloading stock, including "non-litigated product whose legality under the injunction is legitimately in question". ®